Critique, Repair and Care: Rebuilding the Black and Decolonial Archive with Theaster Gates and Kader Attia

How might Black and decolonial archives be refound, repaired, or rebuilt, in light of their notable omission from the stories that museums and archives have told? This question is of course not solely mine to ask. The question itself suggests that omission implies absence, lack, or deficiency — not only that there is insufficient evidence to be admissible into the archive, but that this leads to ontological insufficiency. The omission of Black life from the archive is closely allied to racist and racialising epistemological claims about lack, absence, or deficiency as defining features of Black and postcolonial life. Archives are, as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay identifies, not simply a collection of documents or their institutional housing, but also a regime that systematises imperial violence, which ‘shapes a world, not just distorts the ways it is perceived (its representations)’. For centuries European colonial practices, knowledge systems, and racial science have fed narratives driving white Anglo-European misperceptions of racialised lack as a negative quality inherent to Blackness. It follows, then, that the conceptual conflation of omission and lack has been the focus of Black studies for some time. This is the ‘zone of non-being’ described by Franz Fanon, or what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has described as ‘the process of imagining black people as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero’. Taking a lead from scholars of postcolonial/decolonial, critical race and Black studies, Jenny Chamarette’s question might be better rephrased as: how to reveal the richness, radical complexity, and abundance of Black, decolonial, and pre-colonial historical life when the epistemological structures of archives and museums have prioritised narratives and knowledges of whiteness? And how might this happen in the context of moving-image media in museum spaces?